“Straight line distance is approximately one kilometre.”
“Got a map?”
The console lit up with a street grid, complete with location cross hairs for Jerry’s and the names of the streets fired in green. I studied it for a couple of moments.
“All right. Drop me there. Nineteenth and Missouri.”
“As part of our customer charter, it is my duty to warn you that this is not an advisable destination.”
I sat back and felt the grin creeping back onto my face, unforced this time.
“Thanks.”
The cab set me down, without further protest, at the cross of Nineteenth and Missouri. I glanced around as I climbed out and grinned again. Inadvisable destination had been a typical machine understatement.
Where the streets I’d chased the Mongolian through the night before were deserted, this part of Licktown was alive, and its inhabitants made Jerry’s clientele look almost salubrious. As I paid off the autocab, a dozen heads swivelled to focus on me, none of them wholly human. I could almost feel mechanical photomultiplier eyes ratcheting in from a distance on the currency I’d chosen to pay with, seeing the notes in ghostly luminescent green; canine-augmented nostrils twitching with the scent of my hotel bath gel, the whole crowd picking up the blip of wealth on their street sonar like the trace of a bottleback shoal on a Millsport skipper’s screen.
The second cab was spiralling down behind me. An unlit alley beckoned, less than a dozen metres away. I’d barely stepped into it when the first of the locals made their play.
“You looking for something, tourist?”
There were three of them, the lead vocalist a two-and-a-half-metre giant naked to the waist with what looked like Nakamura’s entire muscle graft sales for the year wrapped around his arms and trunk. There were red illuminum tattoos under the skin of his pectorals so his chest looked like a dying coal fire and a glans-headed cobra reared up the ridged muscle of his stomach from his waistline. The hands that hung open at his sides were tipped with filed talons. His face was seamed with scar tissue from the freak fights he had lost and there was a cheap prosthetic magnilens screwed into one eye. His voice was surprisingly soft and sad sounding.
“Come slumming, maybe,” the figure on the giant’s right said viciously. He was young and slim and pale with long, fine hair falling across his face and there was a twitchiness about his stance that said cheap neurachem. He would be the fastest.
The third member of the welcoming committee said nothing, but lips peeled back from a canine snout to show transplanted predator teeth and an unpleasantly long tongue. Below the surgically augmented head, the body was male human beneath tightly strapped leather.
Time was shortening. My tail would be paying off his cab, getting his bearings. If he’d decided to take the risk. I cleared my throat.
“I’m just passing through. You’re wise, you’ll let me. There’s a citizen landing back there you’ll find easier to take.”
There was a brief, disbelieving pause. Then the giant reached for me. I brushed away his hand, fell back a step and wove a rapid pattern of obvious killing strikes into the air between us. The trio froze, the canine augment snarling. I drew breath.
“Like I said, you’re wise you’ll let me pass.”
The giant was ready to let it go. I could see it in his broken face. He’d been a fighter long enough to spot combat training and the instincts of a lifetime in the ring told him when the balance was tipped. His two companions were younger and knew less about losing. Before he could say anything, the pale kid with the neurachem lashed out with something sharp and the augment went for my right arm. My own neurachem, already ticking over and probably more pricey, was faster. I took the kid’s arm and broke it at the elbow, twisting him round on his own pain and into his two companions. The augment ducked around him and I kicked out, connecting hard with nose and mouth. A yelp and he went down. The kid dropped to his knees, keening and nursing his shattered elbow. The giant surged forward and fetched up with the stiffened fingers of my right hand a centimetre from his eyes.
“Don’t,” I said quietly
The kid moaned on the ground at our feet. Behind him, the canine augment lay where the kick had thrown him, twitching feebly. The giant crouched between them, big hands reaching as if to comfort. He looked up at me, mute accusation for something in his face.
I backed away down the alley about a dozen metres, then turned and sprinted. Let my tail work his way through that and catch me up.
The alley made a right-angle turn before spilling out onto another crowded street. I turned the corner and let my speed run down so that I emerged into the street at a fast walk. Turning left, I shouldered my way into the midst of the crowd and started looking for street signs.
Outside Jerry’s, the woman was still dancing, imprisoned in the cocktail glass. The club sign was alight and business seemed, if anything, to be brisker than the previous night. Small knots of people came and went beneath the flexing arms of the door robot, and the dealers I’d injured during the fight with the Mongolian had been replaced several times over.
I crossed the street and stood before the robot while it padded me down, and the synth voice said, “Clear. Do you want cabins or bar?”
“What’s the deal in the bar?”
“Ha ha ha,” went the laugh protocol. “The bar is look, but don’t touch. No money down, no hands on. House rule. That applies to other customers too.”
“Cabins.”
“Down the stairs, to the left. Take a towel from the pile.”
Down the stairs, along the corridor lit in rotating red, past the towel alcove and the first four closed cabin doors. Blood-deep thunder of the junk rhythm in the air. I closed the fifth door behind me, fed a few notes to the credit console for appearances’ sake, and stepped up to the frosted glass screen.
“Louise?”
The curves of her body thudded against the glass, breasts flattened. The cherry light in the cabin flung stripes of light across her.
“Louise, it’s me. Irene. Lizzie’s mother.”
A smear of something dark between the breasts, across the glass. The neurachem leapt alive inside me. Then the glass door slid aside and the girl’s body sagged off its inner surface into my arms. A wide-muzzled gun appeared over her shoulder, pointed at my head.
“Right there, fucker,” said a tight voice. “This is a toaster. You do one wrong thing, it’ll take your head off your chest and turn your stack to solder.”
I froze. There was an urgency in the voice that wasn’t far off panic. Very dangerous.
“That’s it.” The door behind me opened, gusting the pulse of the music in the corridor, and a second gun muzzle jammed into my back. “Now you put her down, real slow, and stand back.”
I lowered the body in my arms gently onto the satin padded floor and stood up again. Bright white light sprang up in the cabin, and the revolving cherry blinked pinkly twice and went out. The door behind me thudded shut on the music while before me, a tall blond man in close-fitting black advanced into the room, knuckles whitened on the trigger of his particle blaster. His moudi was compressed and the whites of his eyes were flaring around stimulant-blasted pupils. The gun in my back bore me forward and the blond kept coming until the muzzle of the blaster was smearing my lower lip against my teeth.
“Now who the fuck are you?” he hissed at me.
I turned my head aside far enough to open my mouth. “Irene Elliott. My daughter used to work here.”
The blond stepped forward, gun muzzle tracing a line down my cheek and under my chin.
“You’re lying to me,” he said softly. “I’ve got a friend out at the Bay City justice facility, and he tells me Irene Elliott’s still on stack. See, we checked out the bag of shit you sold this cunt.”